Based on our experience as readers, writers, and editors, we
think that fair online excerpting is--and should be--viewed
differently than "fair use" in offline media. Specifically, we
think that as publishers recognize the value of having their
content quoted, debated, discussed, and linked to throughout the
blogosphere, they become less concerned about the number of words
or paragraphs in any particular excerpt. (We certainly have.)

As far as we can tell, the vast majority of publishers already
feel this way. We have been publishing for 20 months
now--more than 25,000 posts--and we have been asked to shorten
excerpts only twice. (We did so immediately.) Over the same
period, we have received hundreds of notes from publishers and
writers thanking us for excerpting and linking to them, and we
get dozens of notes every day from publishers who hope we will do
so. Similarly, we have had our own stuff excerpted very
liberally, by thousands of sites, and only in the egregious case
described below--the automatic republishing of our entire,
full-text RSS feed--have we kicked up a fuss.

All this said, a few publishers are still focused on word count,
so it makes sense to discuss this publicly.

Our Current
Policy

Importantly, at The Business Insider, we don't just want
to do what's "fair." We want to do what's
right. Specifically, we want other sites and
authors to be happy we excerpted and linked to their
stuff.

With that in mind, here is our current policy:

We excerpt others the way
we hope others will excerpt us.

What does that mean? It means that if you think our stuff
is worth bringing to your readers' attention, we are honored and
grateful. Please excerpt it as liberally as you
want. In return, please just give us clear credit,
links back, and an incentive for interested readers to visit our
site. (Not all readers--some.)

To be clear: As long as you give us credit and links, we are not
particularly concerned with the length of the excerpt.
Frankly, we'd rather have your readers read our words than your
summary of our words, and we see no reason why you should waste
your time re-writing something that we've already tried to say
clearly. (If we've garbled it, by all means...) If you
occasionally feel you need to run our whole post to make the
point, go ahead and run it. Just consider adding a
"Related" link to another of our stories so some of your readers
might come and check us out.

One important exception to the above is publishers who habitually
run our entire posts with no additional commentary or links
back--or, worse, just simply publish our entire RSS feed.
We're not cool with that, so stop.

Most
Importantly...

Excerpting standards are still evolving, so fairness is still
very much in the eye of the beholder. If you think we have
excerpted too much of your stuff or have been stingy with links
or credit, tell us, and we'll change it immediately.